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Thursday, February 26, 2004

Jeff Bezos and Ecosystem Thinking

Lots of commentators and blogs have picked up on a recent Business Week story about Amazon (December 22, 2003).

But Amazon has been working towards this for a long time indeed. When I searched the web for "Bezos" and "ecosystem", the first page of hits included a story from June 2000, in which a senior manager at HP acknowledged that he had gotten ecosystem thinking from talking to Jeff Bezos.

Recent developments by Amazon and eBay (as described by David Sprott at the CBDi Forum) establish a business service stack for the eCommerce sector. (No longer available online.)

But this isn't just a clever tactical move. It follows logically from a strategic direction that Amazon has been pursuing for a considerable time. During the dot-Com boom, there was lots of superficial admiration of Amazon, and lots of companies trying to emulate it. But few of them mastered ecosystem thinking, and few of them survived the downturn.